A substantial portion of the cost of microelectronic device fabrication is attributable to the capital cost of lithography equipment. Such equipment produces integrated circuits by drawing patterns on a substrate using commonly known methods, such as photolithography, e-beam lithography, as well as many others. Photolithography requires the use of expensive patterned masks. Exposure of the substrate to UV radiation through the mask pattern, followed by etching, forms circuit traces on the substrate. A microscopic electronic device is formed through repetition of this elaborate process so as to generate a series of adjacent stacked circuit layers. The cost of fabrication increases as the device geometry becomes more complex and the feature size diminishes. For features smaller than 1 μm, e-beam lithography may be needed to create the masks, and deep UV (X-ray) exposure systems may be necessary to perform the substrate lithography. With e-beam lithography, an electron beam is used to draw the features on the surface of the substrate of the masks. This process is very slow because the features are typically drawn sequentially by a single electron beam. Furthermore, multiple lithography steps must be aligned to one another for the resulting device to be operational.
Another method of microelectronic device fabrication is the “dual-damascene” process. Basically, this technique involves etching a trench in a substrate, etching a deeper channel (i.e., a via) within the trench, electrochemically plating an active layer within the trench and the via, and removing the overfill by chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). Currently, only a single material layer (i.e., copper and, possibly, a barrier and/or sticking layer) is plated within the etched trench and via. As a result, this process is limited in terms of the circuitry it can be used to create. Furthermore, the trenches and vias are patterned photolithographically.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a microelectronic device fabrication process that does not use masks or lithography and is not limited to a single material layer.